


Silent Affirmation

by storry_eyed



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Depression, Gen, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 06:12:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5195162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storry_eyed/pseuds/storry_eyed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some days when she just can’t get out of bed. Set early, in the first or second season of DS9.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silent Affirmation

There are some days when she just can’t get out of bed.

Oh, sure, most of the time she’s okay. There are some mornings when she has to push off the fog that surrounds her and makes her movements slow, deliberate, as if the station will crumble under her fingers if she hits a button on her replicator too hard. There are other days when she can’t get warm, when her fingers are numb with cold and she stands at her station, rubbing them together surreptitously and hoping that nobody notices. There are some times when she’s walking through the Promenade and she has to grit her teeth and even squeeze her eyes shut for a few steps because the lights are too bright and the noise is too loud and if she doesn’t concentrate very carefully some of the noises from Quark’s sound an awful lot like phaser fire. But these are the things that she’s found will fade with time and space and prayer and even a few short conversations with these people who are beginning to become her friends, if she can even manage to make and keep such things outside of alliances that are formed through war and the necessity of living. These are the things that she lives with. These are things that she lived with during the Occupation, and these are things that she accepts will always be a part of her life, to some degree. She knows what it’s called; she didn’t need Julian’s PADD with information about PTSD slid under her door two mornings after she went to see him several months ago, defeated by the screaming nightmares she’d had for a solid week after one of her interactions with Dukat, for something, anything, that would help her close her eyes for more than half an hour. She knows too much already: she lives it.

But then there are the days when she just can’t get out of bed.

Most of the time, her eyes will manage to open (she’s learned that sometimes her eyelids are simply too heavy to drag back, and the dampness of her cheeks and the crusting around her tear ducts will tell her why, and it’s simply better to grope for her comm, call Odo, and let him deal with it), and a lot of times, she even manages to make it out of bed and a few steps across the room, before the waterworks begin.

The first time it happened, Kira was so stunned that she simply slid to the floor with a thump and lay there for an hour, her body sobbing while her mind tried to figure out what was wrong while working like its gears were creaky with rust. Eventually she had managed to get herself together enough to call Sisko and explain that she was ill and wouldn’t be coming in for her shift in Ops. There were several agonizing minutes while he tried to convince her to go to the infirmary and she tried to tell him she was fine; she won in the end by saying that she’d go the next day if she didn’t feel any better. Luckily the next day she made it through her morning routine without any tears, and even though she felt like wood, she managed during her shift. She slept through the entire next day, which she happened to have off, but she managed. 

The second time it happened, she was able to make it back to her bed before her legs gave out from under her, and she called Odo, not Sisko. He was just as concerned - probably more so, actually - but he agreed to explain it to Sisko. That was the third time, too, and the fourth.

The fifth time, Sisko came to see her.

She heard the door chime, but she couldn’t seem to connect that sound to the idea that she should get out of bed, walk across the floor, and answer the sound, because she didn’t have even close to the capability to manage that. When she heard the door open, though, her brain kicked slightly more into gear, and she managed to find some reserve of strength to sit up and get out a raspy, “Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” came Sisko’s voice, from outside her bedroom. Kira squeezed her eyes shut. “Are you alright, Major?”

Yes, she said, except her voice didn’t work, so she tried again and overshot it. “Yes,” she said too loudly, almost yelled, her voice cracking in the middle of the word. “Yes, I’m fine.”

“Are you sick?” When she didn’t reply, his voice continued. “If you have something chronic, it’s perfectly alright, but there’s nothing documented, so you might want to see Doctor Bashir if-“

“No,” Kira said, and how her voice sounded tearful; this was exactly how she didn’t want this conversation go. “No, it’s - I’m not - I just-“ she gave up on speech and went for the path of least resistance. “You can come in.”

The door slid open to admit Commander Benjamin Sisko, Emissary of the Prophets, the savior of Kira’s religion, who took in the sight of her lying wrapped up in her covers, soaked with sweat, face tearstreaked and defeated. In any other situation, she would have been humiliated. As it was, she couldn’t muster up the emotions to do much more than realize this.

He assessed the situation for no longer than ten or twenty seconds, and then sat down in a chair next to her bed. His voice, when he spoke, was oddly gentle. She hadn’t known his voice could sound like that.

“It’s a hard feeling to describe, isn’t it?” he said gently, talking easily to the wall that was opposite him. “Something like your entire body has been weighted down, or that you’re having to move through a thick syrup, so that it takes an extraordinary effort to do - oh, ordinary things. Talk to friends. Smile. Laugh.” He paused. “Stand up and get out of bed.”

Kira stared down at her lap and would have worried the edge of the blanket with her fingers, but they felt too much like lead for the effort to be worth it.

“When my wife died, that’s how I felt for a long time. The only thing that I could manage to do was take care of Jake. I spent hours just sitting in my dad’s restaurant, staring at nothing, not responding to people when they spoke to me. Eventually I got enough of myself back to start going through the motions again, and after that, I started to find reasons other than my son to get dressed. It took a long time - certainly months, and if I’m being honest with myself, more like years - but I managed to get past the worst of those experiences. Sometimes I wake up and I feel all those things creeping back, and most of the time I can fight them off, but sometimes I can’t, but I know that there’s a light on the other side.” He paused, and then looked at her. “At least, that’s been my experience.”

Kira was silent for a long time before she replied, her voice hoarse, “It’s the feeling that there’s no point that’s what’s crushing me. I don’t know what do to. There’s nothing I can do. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does I can’t fight it. It just - is.”

He simply nodded, and she felt a sense of surprise that she was able to take comfort in his silent affirmation - that it meant something that mattered to her.

They sat that way for a long while, until Kira’s eyelids began to droop from exhaustion. As she drifted off, Sisko softly let himself out of her quarters, pausing in the hallway to make a call to a friend of his that he thought might be helpful.

When Kira woke late that evening, there was a message on her PADD from Jadzia. It simply said that she’d been by and dropped off some food since Benjamin had said she wasn’t feeling well. It was a family recipe of his, she said, and they both hoped Kira would enjoy it and feel better, and once she did, she and Kira should have a meal together sometime.

When Kira managed to walk out into her sitting room after several false starts, she saw a steaming pot of something wonderful sitting on her table, and somehow the process of eating wasn’t as difficult as it had been on other days like this. Maybe, she let herself hope, it wouldn’t ever be as bad as it had been again. Maybe the worst of this soul-crushing darkness wouldn’t be one of those things that she had to live with forever.

She could handle that.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know where this story came from, but it needed to be written. Kira's experiences and emotions are based entirely on my own, but altered to fit her character when I saw fit.
> 
> Thanks to all who read.


End file.
